This was evident at the Twiistup pre-event company pitch last week at UCLA.  Francisco Francisco Dao came up with the idea of letting 10 companies that weren’t selected for Twiistup to do a presentation the night before to a group of people and let the audience pick one company to win the final slot at Twiistup.  I I’m not saying the companies were bad – many were not.  But Most people suck at presenting to big groups.  It’s It’s a shame because the ability to nail these presentations at key conferences can be once-in-a-lifetime

Now there are some firms that have strict rules about not funding pre-revenue companies – that’s different.  Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of thinking that funding is something you do in “funding season,” some mythical  2-month period when you’re ready with a great Powerpoint deck and you hit up all of the VC’s at the same time so that you can quickly raise money and get back to the job of building a business. This is part of my ongoing series “Pitching a VC” – the outline is here . You’ve pitched several angels

This is part of my ongoing series “Start-up Lessons” Tonight I was reading a good blog post ( here ) from Sean Powers with Alistair Croll on preparing yourself for the TC50 “bump” – the rise in traffic that a company gets from presenting at TechCrunch 50.  Worth So many companies suck at managing their booths.  If Worth a read on how to maximize the traffic that comes to you site since much of it will be fleeting. Their post links to a great post by Jason Calacanis ( here ) on how to make the most of your booth experience at the show.  So

This is part of my ongoing series Startup Advice .  When you’re an early-stage startup that hasn’t raised any institutional money you end up doing almost every job function of the company yourself.  But some companies have entrepreneurs that seem talented on paper, are in a space that seems interesting to investors and are able to raise venture capital early in the company’s existence.  This is a story of one of the risks of venture capital. This can often happen when there is a good product built but no real customer adoption yet. 

Some readers have commented that in today’s world you shouldn’t even need a PowerPoint presentation – in this era you should always just demo your product.  They’re also recently wrote a post about a company that came in for a presentation and never even got the slides out or presented a demo.  I Can you just show up without one?  Short photo courtesy of Atlanta Braves This is part of my ongoing series “ Pitching a VC .”

The presenter comes out of the meeting proud at having gotten through all 30 slides (and maybe even a demo) with a bunch of smiling faces and nodding heads and no discussion.  After Most worryingly, many times it means that they have decided that they are not interested in your product (or investing in your company) so why bother having a debate / discussion with you. It is easier for them to This is part of my blog series “ Pitching a VC .” 8221;

On December 2nd, 2006 I wrote the blog post published later in this post when I was CEO of startup Koral about my experiences in pitching VCs.  After my company was acquired by Salesforce.com I was asked to stop blogging and they took over my blog as an asset in the sale of the company.  This blog post ended up on Valleywag (which had much bigger presence back then). My blog was wiped out.  I am very grateful to my friend Zoli Erdos for finding this retro posting for me at web.archive.org.

started the series talking about what I consider the most important attribute of an entrepreneur :  Tenacity .  I I’ll start with an obvious one – I talk with the entrepreneur about competitors.  8221;  When I ask for a quick demo and the CEO tells me that he’ll schedule a follow-on meeting with his sales rep because, “I’m not a demo guy.  This is part of my series on  what makes an entrepreneur successful .  I originally posted it on  VentureHacks , one of my favorite websites for entrepreneurs. 

Needless to say I was positively predisposed to this individual before the meeting started. How you got to the VC is important, but once you’re in the meeting it’s obviously up to you to make the most of it.  We started by talking about this person’s background.  This is part of my ongoing series, “ Pitching a VC .” 8221;

There’s no doubt (at least anecdotally) that the pace of VC investments in early-stage technology companies has picked up in the past few months.   The The real irony of the market thaw is that the biggest symbol of the freeze as I mentioned in my last post is when Sequoia released its famous “RIP Good Times” PowerPoint deck alerting companies to dark days ahead and Ron Conway famously wrote emails to portfolio companies encouraging people to slash and save and prepare for the impending doom in the market.  This In my previous post, The VC Ice Age is Thawing (for now) I wrote about the reasons why the VC market came to a screeching halt in September 2008 and remained largely shut until at least April 2009.  There